Analysis Of Genocide: The Lord's Resistance Army

Genocide has plagued history throughout time. Although the Jewish Holocaust is the most studied and well known, it was not the first episode of genocide in history, and it wasn’t the last. Genocide is often thought of as something of the past, and that the world learned its lesson after World War II. Unfortunately though, not only has genocide continued, but there currently is one unfolding in Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army, made up of rebels trying to overthrow the government, is mimicking the Nazis in many ways, and their leader Joseph Kony is following in the footsteps of Hitler. There are many similarities that link Nazi Germany with today’s situation in northern Uganda, but they have their differences also.
The most tragic similarity
During World War II, the Germans targeted the Jews for murder on the principle of their Jewish faith. They used massive amounts of propaganda to gain support. In Uganda, the Acholi aren’t necessarily being targeted for their religion, but rather the Lord’s Resistance Army abducts them for their army whose goal is to convert the country into a nation of people who derive their government from the Ten Commandments. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, is dedicated to waging war on the people of Uganda in an attempt to overthrow the government. They are a group of religious fanatics determined to institutionalize a government that rules the nation by its twisted interpretation of the Ten Commandments (wikipedia.org). Apparently, they overlooked a couple, including the one forbidding murder. The Lord’s Resistance Army doesn’t allow anyone to disobey the Ten Commandments and work on Sunday. A method they have used in enforcing the rule is cutting off the arms of their victims in order to make it impossible for them to use their arms during work
They were thought of as filthy parasites with whom they did not even want to associate. The associations between the Jews and Nazis were those of a prisoner guard relationship. The Lord’s Resistance Army also thinks very poorly of their victims, but they still associate with them by taking them into their army, and making sex slaves of the women. Children who are abducted by the LRA go through a systematic desensitization process in order to train them to be numb to violence, and kill. The young girls abducted by the LRA also have more sexual contact with them. The girls are forced to be sex slaves to them, and often find themselves left with children by their rapists, and AIDS